David Pownall – författare

The stormy love affair between the legendary dancer Nijinsky and his mentor Diaghilev is the best known scandal in the history of ballet. Set in a mental asylum, as Nijinsky hears of the death of the great impresario and fears for his own life. With and introduction by Nicholas Dromgoole.

An Epiphanous Use of the Microphone was commissioned by the BBC for the 75th anniversary celebrations of BBC Radio drama and broadcast in May 1998. This and five previously unpublished David Pownall radio plays, each an award-winner, make up a compilation of some of this country's finest radio plays. Also includes the plays Beef, Floss, Ploughboy Monday, Under the Table, and Kitty Wilkinson.

This is an epic play written to be performed by children. It covers ten thousand years in the history of the American Indians and the European colonists who began to settle in the Americas in the 16th century, and its stage takes in Peru, Mexico, North America and the great rivers. It supplements history and geography lessons in a vivid and fascinating way and explores the American Indian's place in popular culture.

Includes the plays An Audience Called Edouard, Livingstone and Sechele, Motocar and Richard III Part Two David Pownall is one of Britain's leading playwrights. This collection brings together four of his most popular stage plays. In An Audience Called Edouard Karl Marx is brought to life from Manet's famous painting Dejeuner sur l'Herbe whilst at the same time being hunted by the police. Livingstone and Sechele tells the story of Dr Livingstone, a missionary, who only made one convert: a young African chief living in the Kalahari Desert. Motocar is an intriguing story set in the linen room of a mental hospital for blacks, two weeks before Independence, while Richard III Part Two ingeniously examines the uses and abuses of history.

Includes the plays Beef, The Viewing, My Father's House and Black Star Beef, a winner of the John Whiting Award, has so far only been published in radio form. In The Viewing a family buy a house which is haunted by God, while My Father's House, commissioned by Birmingham Rep, looks at British politics through the eyes of Joseph Chamberlain and family. Black Star centres around the black American actor Ira Aldridge, touring in Shakespeare in Poland in 1865

Dawn, Coronation Day 1953. The artist Francis Bacon works on his portrait of Pope Innocent X, inspired by Velazquez' masterpiece and his own deep absorption in human carnality. The chaotic studio is populated by characters possessing the power of change, who come to life in a satirical interplay of art, history, sex and politics.

Features four plays - "Gaunt" and "Lile Jimmy Williamson" focus on the myth and reality of power surrounding two local legends; "Buck Ruxton" is an imperial tragedy of 1936; and "A Tale of Two Town Halls" is a political satire, a comedy cartoon on the IMF crisis in the mid-Seventies.

Writing ‘Master Class’ is a biography of David Pownall’s play, Master Class (1983), from conception to coming of age.Threaded through the account of the inception and development of the piece are twists of authorial life-story necessary for the telling. Whereas a novel or poem can be kept a secret until it is properly finished, a play has to go out to meet the people early. On the day the script is put into the hands of actors, the soul of the thing passes out of the author's control. It can be bent, battered, warped – or improved within its being far beyond expectations. As a drama of dictatorship in art and the cleverness needed to evade its worst manifestations, Master Class has been at large for thirty years, produced in twenty countries, in some several times. What has been done to it, how it has fared, is touched upon but the main story in this book is the making of the piece. A fascinating insight into the playwright’s craft.